Review of The Cambridge Companion to Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' edited by Lex Newman

Abstract


 
 
 This is a very welcome addition to the currently burgeoning stock of multi-authored works on Locke’s philosophy in general, distinguished by its concentration on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in particular. Readers will find in it a remarkably full range of themes and issues explored by some leading Locke scholars. According to the book’s cover, it is ‘pitched to advanced undergraduates and graduate students’. Some of the chapters would certainly be suitable items for undergraduate reading lists, but others are probably rather too demanding and will appeal mainly to other Locke scholars. All of the essays are new compositions and many of them present interesting new interpretations of Locke’s views. Locke’s works, and the Essay in particular, are fertile ground for such interpretive exercises—not because he wrote at all obscurely, but because his views, and preferred manner of expressing them, underwent continual change and development over the course of successive rewritings, partly as a result of his own critical reflection on them and partly in response to his engagement with other thinkers, in both correspondence and conversation. There is perhaps too much effort by some of his modern commentators to present definitive and consistent interpretations of Locke’s positions on various matters, almost as though to concede that Locke might often have been unsettled and conflicted in his opinions would be impugning his ability or importance as a philosopher—when in fact it is only lesser philosophers who resolutely stick to their guns in their dealings with the deepest questions of philosophy. Part of the excitement of reading Locke’s own words lies in sensing his continual struggle with the problems that he discusses—a struggle that is a testament to his intellectual honesty and open-mindedness. Sometimes, when reading the close dissections of his work by modern commentators, with their frequent cross-references and carefully selected quotations, one suspects that Locke himself, were he to be presented with their lengthy musings and minute analyses, would throw up his hands in either despair or irritation at exercises that he might deem excessively scholastic in their nicety and refinement. I do not mean to reproach any of the contributors to the present volume in this regard, all of whose essays inspire one to return to the Essay itself with renewed curiosity and sometimes with unsettling doubts about one’s own previous understanding of it.